Fire turned Cape Cod into ‘Owners Unknown’
Burned books helped ignite a development boom more than a century later
This sketch is of Barnstable’s Olde Colonial Courthouse, built around 1774, drawn from memory by Gustavas Hinckley in the 19th century. It stood apart from the records building that burned in 1827, a smaller, two-story structure. The drawing comes from an appendix to “A Report on the 2016 Architectural Survey at The Olde Colonial Courthouse, Barnstable, Massachusetts,” prepared for “Tales of Cape Cod” by the Plymouth Archaeological Rediscovery Project, authors Craig S. Chartier and Daniel Wheelock.
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One event, one night almost two centuries ago, created generations of confusion and havoc for people trying to buy and sell land on Cape Cod.
The night was October 22, 1827, 194 years ago. The event was a raging fire that burned the county house down.
In ashes lay all but one of 93 crucial volumes that had recorded land ownership across the peninsula since 1686. More than 140 years of deeds detailing transactions were reduced to cinders, and with them all certainty about Cape Cod’s land history.
From that night forward, the term “owners unknown” would hover over every Cape town, doom many a transaction, but also become a golden opportunity for those savvy enough to work the system.
The county house, as it was called, sat along Route 6A in Barnstable village, now 3096 Main Street according to the fine research librarian at Sturgis Library, close to the contemporary library and Crocker Tavern. It was a handsome two-story building, erected in 1820, 25 by 20 feet, brick with a wooden roof and plenty of big windows.
On the left side was the probate office, and above that the clerk of courts. On the right was a storage area for firewood, and on the second floor the Registry of Deeds.
No one knows how the fire started. Given strong winds that night and an open hearth below, people assumed that a flying cinder somehow caught the wood stored within.
The Rev. Henry Hersey, pastor of a neighboring church, first realized what was happening, according to a note he wrote in his parish book:
“1827, Oct. 22 – This evening at 15 minutes before 11 o’clock I discovered the county house to be on fire and gave the alarm.”
That meant he ran to what was called Crocker’s Hotel, a tavern still standing. He found a group of men doing what men do at a tavern -- playing cards. One of them, Josiah Hinckley, wrote down his recollections years later:
“(B)etween 10 and 11 o’clock the knocker on the front door was put into rapid motion, attended with the cry of fire. The wind was northeasterly, blowing almost a gale. In two minutes or less Captain Joseph Bursley and myself were up the steps to the County House, together. The fire was then confined to the office of the Clerk of Courts. We found the front door open, and soon forced our way into the Probate Office, and opened the two windows on the westerly side of the room and passed the record books out to the Rev. Mr. Hersey and Mr. Isaac Chipman, who took them to a place of safety. This operation did not exceed 15 minutes.”
Note one intriguing mention: “We found the front door open…” We have to assume that the county house (like the probate office upstairs) would have been locked. Does this suggest an intruder? Arson? There is no mention of that possibility in any surviving account.
Regardless, all but three of the Probate Court’s records were saved. But Hinckley and Bursley weren’t done yet:
“Captain Bursley turned to the left to go up to the Registry of Deeds office. I made my way out to the easterly side of the building where were gathered some 12 or 15 persons, but who had made no preparation to get into the Register of Deeds’ office by the windows. Captain Bursley joined me in less than two minutes. The smoke was so dense in the hallway that he had had to beat a retreat. We then went to the barn on the opposite side of the road and returned with a ladder which was placed up to the north windows of the Registry of Deeds office, where I soon found myself.
“It being fastened down I made a breach in it with my foot. The room was full of smoke; the hole made in the window made a strong draft, and the fire looked me full in the face and seemed to say, as I construed it, ‘You had better stand back and make room for me.’ There was a record book on the desk within my reach which I laid violent hands on, which proved to be the 61st.”
Hinckley’s account explains why only one book from the Registry survived.
The fire’s impact was felt in every village and town. Priceless records were lost forever, including most of the civil and criminal court documents dating before the Revolution. But losing the land deeds and transactions really stung. To recover, every town deputized someone (often the town clerk) to act as a local register of deeds, going door to door to convince people to produce whatever records might prove ownership.
The county even established a bounty; 12 and a half cents paid for each deed recorded that was less than 40 years old.
You might think that would have been plenty of incentive, but understand that once you re-recorded your deed, you would be liable for taxes. The 12 and a half cents didn’t look so enticing in that light. Besides, why bother to register and pay when no one was going to take your property away from you? It only made sense if you needed to clear a sale in the works.
Two years later, 1829, only 13 new volumes had been created to replace 93 lost. And what those 13 contained was suspect; unscrupulous people in many towns took the occasion to fabricate or embellish deeds.
Chains of title across the Cape were broken beyond repair.
“The loss has ever since been felt, causing much land title litigation,” is how historian Donald Trayser described the situation a century later, in 1939.
This murkiness, leading to the phrase “owners unknown” stamped on a huge amount of Cape Cod property, also led to great opportunity by the 1960s, as land began to become more valuable, subdivisions built for “washashores” beginning to checkerboard pine forests.
Surveyors, lawyers, builders, old-timers versed in town and family histories, began panning the Registry of Deeds for their version of gold. Some paid petty back taxes to say that now, the owner is no longer unknown. Some convinced a distant relative of a distant partial owner to hand over any hint of a claim to title. Some pieced together multiple parcels like jigsaw puzzles and then went into Land Court to stake a claim.
Some did all of that.
These land miners played a major role in the exploding development of Cape Cod by the 1970s. It would have happened anyway, but without the fire of 1827, it would have happened a lot differently, and some of the biggest, pieced-together subdivisions – with some of the biggest fortunes made – wouldn’t have been possible.
NEXT: WHILE THE POWER WAS OUT, THOUGHTS ON THE VULNERABLE GRID STARTED SHINING THROUGH
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Very fascinating!
Good sleuthing Seth. No wonder title searches on the Cape are often so complicated.